Description
This paper reads Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s life (1903–1988) as method and archive. A socialist and feminist from modern India, Kamaladevi challenged post-independence orthodoxies that equated modernity with factory industrialism. She reimagined development as humane, decentralised, and culturally grounded. Drawing on practical knowledge of craft economies, cooperatives and guilds, gendered labour, and rural production, she outlined a post-colonial path to equitable progress that offered a global alternative to both capitalist and communist teleologies. Working through a decolonial lens that treats the oral and the lived as knowledge, the paper reads her biography as a text for global, gendered herstories. It highlights her writings, organising, and institution-building for handicrafts that still anchor decentralised development in India and influenced reforms in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Centring women as creative agents, Kamaladevi valued dignity, creativity, and cultural continuity over mechanisation and insisted livelihoods be read within intersecting inequalities.
